Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Great Lakes

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Located in the middle of North America lies one of the largest collections of freshwater lakes in the world.  These lakes have a unique geological origin and function, like few lakes in the world.  Also, given their location, they are home to several large industrial centers and is part of one of the most important economic waterways on the planet.  Learn more about the Great Lakes, how they were made, and their importance on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsor If you’re looking for a simpler and cost-effective supplement routine, Athletic Greens is giving you a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase. Go to athleticgreens.com/EVERYWHERE.  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Located in the middle of North America lies one of the largest collection of freshwater lakes in the world. These lakes have a unique geological origin and function like few other lakes on Earth. Also, given their location, they're home to several large industrial centers and is part of one of the most important economic waterways on the planet. Learn more about the Great Lakes, how they were made, and their importance on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep, only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pill? thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens.

No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing.

You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. The Great Lakes are a system of five enormous lakes that lie between the United States and Canada. Collectively, the five lakes are the largest in the world in terms of area and the second largest in terms of volume, just slightly behind Lake by Call, which will be the subject of a future episode.

And for those of you who are wondering why the Caspian Sea is enlisted, it's because the Caspian Sea isn't generally considered to be a lake. The reason is that the Caspian Sea isn't a body of fresh water. Its water is actually salty, although only a third of the salinity of the oceans. It is an inland body of water, but it is different enough that it usually doesn't fit the general classification for a lake. The five Great Lakes are Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Unique. Ontario. While each of the five lakes is separate, they are all interconnected, creating a single waterway. The surface area of the Great Lakes is approximately the size of the United Kingdom. By surface area, Lake Superior is the largest lake in the world, with Michigan coming in third,

Huron 4th, Erie 10th, and Ontario 12th. Other lakes on that list include three rift lakes from Africa, Lake Baikal, and the Great Bear Lake in Canada. The Great Lakes were created about 14,000, thousand years ago during the last ice age. The massive ice sheets which covered North America created large depressions in the location of the Great Lakes. When the glaciers retreated, the depressions filled up with water, creating the lakes we now know today. One of the lakes, which is always compared to the Great Lakes, is Lake Baikal in Russia, which is the largest lake in the world in terms of the volume of water by quite a wide margin. By call, which will be the subject of a future episode is the result of a continental rift, similar to what created the Great Rift Lakes

in Africa. Any discussion of individual lakes has to start with the biggest of the great lakes, Lake Superior. As I previously mentioned, Superior is the largest lake in the world by area and the third largest by volume behind Bical and Tanganyika. A full 10% of all the standing freshwater in the world can be found in Lake Superior. The Ajibuah people who lived on the the northern shore of the lake called it Gitchie Gamy, which subsequently became anglicized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow into Gichagumi, and was subsequently popularized by the Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot in his song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Superior is the deepest of the Great Lakes by far, with an average depth of 483 feet or 147 meters, and a maximum depth of

1,332 feet or 406 meters. Because of its depth, Superior holds more water than all of the other four Great Lakes combined. There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover the entirety of North and South America to a depth of 30 centimeters or 12 inches. There is one notable island in Lake Superior, Isle Royale, which is technically in the state of Michigan. If you look at a map, it might seem odd that Isle Royale is part of Michigan, given that it's right off the shore of Minnesota. The island was actually seated to the United States by, Britain in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, and then was given to Michigan when it became a state 20 years before Minnesota. Superior is the closest thing you will ever experience to visiting the ocean

without actually visiting the ocean. Outside of some areas immediately near the shore, the lake does not freeze over in the winter, and by the same token, it also doesn't warm up very much in the summer, meaning that only the most intrepid swimmers would actually try to go swimming in Lake Superior. You can do it, but good luck if you try. The next largest of the lakes is Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan is the second largest great lake in terms of water volume and the third largest in terms of area, and the only one of the lakes which lies solely within the United States. Hydrologically speaking, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are actually the same lake.

The two lakes are connected via the Straits of Mackinaw, which at its narrowest point is only 3 and a half or 5.6 kilometers across, and it's short enough that it spanned by the Mackinaw Bridge. The water levels in both lakes are the same, and the water can flow back and forth between them depending on conditions. The largest city on Lake Michigan is Chicago. The city's location was determined by the creation of the Illinois and Michigan Canal that connected Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River Basin. It's actually a really short canal, but it allowed for a ship to theoretically travel from New Orleans to Montreal without ever having to enter the Atlantic Ocean. For people in Wisconsin or Michigan who want to visit each other, it can take a very

long time to drive around the lake. During the summer, there is a ferry service that can turn an almost 500-mile car ride into just a 60-mile ferry ride. Lake Huron is connected to Lake Superior via the St. Mary's River and the Sioux-Marie, which are located between Sue St. Marie, Michigan, and Sioux-St. Marie, Ontario. Within Lake Huron sits the large Georgian Bay, which lies entirely within the province of Ontario. In Georgian Bay lies Manitoulin Island, which is the largest freshwater island in the world. Manitoulin Island is so large that it has lakes of its own. One of those lakes, Lake Mindemoya, has an island on it called Treasure Island. Treasure Island is the world's largest island on a lake, on an island in a lake. And there's actually a settlement on the island,

meaning that someday somebody could build an artificial lake on it with an island in the middle, making it an island on a lake on an island in a lake. And when that happened, we will have achieved total island lake inception. Lake Huron flows south through the St. Clair River into a widening of the river known as Lake St. Clair, and then through the Detroit River. Across the Detroit River are the cities of Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. This is the busiest border crossing between the United States and Canada. Because the river winds, it also results in a trivia question, what country lies directly south of Detroit? And the answer is Canada. The Detroit River then empties into Lake Erie. Lake Erie is the fourth largest lake,

but substantially smaller than the other three lakes I've mentioned so far. It has only 44% of the surface area of Lake Michigan, and it is the smallest of the lakes by volume. The lake is the location of Point Peeley, which is the southernmost point of the Canadian mainland, and also Middle Island, which is just off Point Peeley, and is the southernmost piece of Canadian land. Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, which means that it has the lowest retention time of all the lakes as well. Retention time is just the median amount of time water stays in a lake. The retention time for Lake Erie is to 6 years, whereas for Lake Superior, it's 191 years.

Lake Erie has several major ports, including Toledo and Cleveland, Ohio, Erie, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo, New York. Buffalo lies at the extreme eastern side of the lake, which results in it getting an extreme amount of snow. The snow is the result of what's known as the lake effect. It's the result of cold, dry air that blows over warmer lake water, as the prevailing winds on all the great lakes blow west to east, that means the locations on the eastern side of the lakes can often get a lot of snow. Personally, I live on the western side of Lake Michigan, and while it can't get cold, we don't get nearly as much snow as places north of here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which are on the eastern shore of Lake Superior.

Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie are all roughly at the same elevation. Other than the Seulocks, which drop 21 feet or 6.5 meters, you can travel by water without much difficulty. However, this all changes once the water leaves Lake Erie. Lake Erie is at an elevation of 173 meters or 569 feet above sea level. By the time the water flows into Lake Ontario, it has dropped 326 feet or 100 meters. Most of this drop occurs in a single spot which you're probably familiar with, Niagara Falls. The Niagara River is extremely rough, which is why it was the location for some of the earliest large hydroelectric plants in North America. Ships going from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario will travel by the Wellen Canal, which cuts right

through Ontario. There's a series of eight locks that raise ships up and down to cover the change in elevation. Lake Ontario has a rather light population on the American side, but on the Canadian side is the largest city on the shore of any of the Great Lakes, Toronto. When water leaves Lake Ontario, it's done with the Great Lakes. lakes, but its voyage still is incomplete. The last body of water has to traverse is the St. Lawrence River. The St. Lawrence River sits on the border of Ontario in New York before flowing totally into Quebec. The river drops the final 75 meters or 246 feet from Lake Ontario. Passage through the St. Lawrence River was possible, but not easy for bigger ships. This led to the construction in the 1950s of the St. Lawrence

seaway, which is a collection of locks and canals alongside the river. The entirety of all of the lakes, rivers, locks and canals, which connect the Great Lakes together, are collectively known as the Great Lakes Waterway. This system allows ships to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes most distant port, Duluth, Minnesota, for a total of 2,340 miles, or 3,770 kilometers. There are over 100 freighters that operate just on the Great Lakes. There are over 100 freighters that operate just on the Great Lakes. Most of these ships only operate on the lakes as they're too large to use the St. Lawrence Seaway. Over 162 million tons of dry bulk goods are transported on the Great Lakes every year, with the biggest products being iron ore, grain, and potash.

The iron ore comes from northern Minnesota, the grain from all over the upper gray plains, and the potash comes from Canada. Few people purposely visit the Great Lakes like they would a beach on an ocean. The beaches aren't as good and the water is. is much colder. However, because the Great Lakes are much smaller than any ocean, you can experience them by driving around them. A trip around Lake Superior is actually one of the best trips you can make in North America, even though few people actually bother to do it. Economically, the Great Lakes are one of the world's most important inland waterways. Hydrologically, they're one of the world's most important reservoirs of fresh water,

and politically, they serve as the most important boundary and area of cooperation between the United States and Canada. For these reasons, and just for their raw size, the Great Lakes collectively are perhaps the most important lakes on Earth. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I have a boostogram for you today. Listener Uza sent 333 sats on the episode on the world's greatest wagers and had the following comment. They said, this is the first time I've heard the word Principia with a K. Indeed, one of the results suggest Principia, but the rest goes into Principia. Troll job done for today. Nice episode, but expected to hear more about the rice

corns and the checkerboard. One of the nicest stories in history, and it's always great to educate people about compound interest in fiat money. Well, thanks, Ozah. First, the story of the greens of rice and the checkerboard is an apocryphal story. There's no evidence that it ever really happened. It's a great story to demonstrate just how fast things can grow exponentially, but there's no actual history behind it. Second, the proper pronunciation for the Principia Mathematica is Principia. This is because the Principia Mathematica is a Latin text. The whole book was written in Latin. In Latin, the letter C is always pronounced as a hard C like the letter K.

Principia is an anglicized version. It's commonly pronounced that way, as most people don't know Latin, but it isn't how Newton would have pronounced it. If you watch any videos with science historians, I would bet that their preferred pronunciation would be Principia. That being said, there are other Latin words with a C that are usually not pronounced with a hard C. Caesar and Cicero would technically be pronounced Kaiser and Kikiro, but we say Caesar and Cicero because that's what everybody knows them as, and it would just be pretentious and confusing to pronounce them in their original Latin. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you two can have it read on the show.